Harnessing Animation in Advertising with Mighty Nice
Animation has an innate potential for creativity and visual appeal, offering brands a tantalising medium for connecting with audiences.
Animation transcends the limitations of live-action, allowing for imaginative narratives that captivate and engage audiences of all ages. When harnessed effectively, animation can transform brand messages into memorable experiences, making it a unique and powerful tool in the marketer's arsenal.
Sydney-based animation company Mighty Nice is one such team harnessing the creative power of animation — making mighty films, amazing experiences, and original content for brands, the arts, and culture.
LBB asked the Mighty Nice team: How can a mastery of animation, storytelling prowess, and creative vision be harnessed by campaigns to captivate audiences and drive meaningful engagement with the brand?
Darren Price - ECD and Founder
Darren> I’m constantly amazed at how you can pack so much appeal and style into 30 seconds when you’re creating a traditional TVC. I’m also constantly reminded of how much potential there is to create something memorable that will grow a lot of love.
I see animated campaigns as repeatable wins. Animation does this particularly well because once everything is in place, hitting the same budget and emotional notes and creating the same amount of awesome you need to craft a memorable campaign is relatively straightforward when the agency and studio are aligned.
Everything about animation is so well planned and meticulously iterated that it really lets creative teams think big—across the cast, multi-platform elements, and hidden Easter eggs. It all becomes quite addictive, and once you’ve had a good experience, it becomes addictive.
Our QBE work is a classic example of this. Insurance can be a dry topic, but with the agency, we built a world that encompassed families, sports teams, and town centres—a mini “Springfield”—filled with dogs, great timing, solid gags, and a distinct style that ran for four years. Good times all around.
Tina Braham - Executive Producer
Tina> The pre-production stage is the most vital and rewarding stage of producing an animated campaign. This is where creatives collaborate to create the style, and perfect the craft and structure of the animation to come. For the uninitiated, it can seem like there is more work up front, but when the groundwork has been laid properly, there is so much opportunity to finesse the final campaign.
Working with agencies to bring out the best of their ideas is always rewarding. Our friends at Leo Burnett Melbourne and the Proud and Punch campaign are prime examples of this. When you have beautifully written scripts, great comedic actors and beautifully crafted storytelling, the animation is just the bomb. Then it’s all about trusting the process.
Matt Taylor - Business Development
Matt> When a taxi driver asks me what Mighty Nice does, I tell them, “We do those quokkas for HBF”, and they always know what I mean. They also often say those ads made them change their health insurance to HBF. And this, to me, is the big test in these distracted multi-platform days - can our characters cut through all the noise, reach the right audience, make them laugh and then make them buy the product?
We’ve done a lot of work for great clients over the last 16 years and try to stay style agnostic - so we are by no means just “the Quokka studio” - but we developed the characters and animation for this campaign with our friends at Leo Burnett. After four years it keeps on going. Animation can do many things, it can literally do anything, but at the end of the day, brand engagement means capturing the right eyeballs and stamping itself into memories. Our HBF campaign is an awesome example of how powerful character animation can deliver this. This campaign was also just voted one of Australia’s top ten most-liked campaigns on TV, so it's not just me and a few taxi drivers that feel this way.
Plus - quokkas with mullets singing 80s power ballads - you can’t do that in any other medium.
